Question: who is the girl next to you in your picture sha has nice hair! :) anyways my question is do you enjoy what you do ? and what outcome do you hope from this?

Lori-An Etherington answered on 15 Jun 2010:

Hi, the girl next to me is a friend from work, this photo was taken on our Christmas night out. She always has amazing natural curls – I don’t have such luck, it takes me ages to straighten my hair!

For your next question I do generally enjoy my work. If a new chemical looks really promising in my experiments I find this exciting. I also like reading about science in books and journals which is important in my job too. Attending meeting and conferences is probably the best part as I get to travel to interesting places, I have been to America, Budapest and different places in the UK so far.

The aim of my work is to try and identify chemicals which look promising for increasing learning and memory. My research is at the very start of the drug development process but the outcome would be for the drug company to make a new medicine which might help people who have learning and memory difficulties, such as people with Alzheimers disease. The drug development process is very long, taking on average 10-12 years and I am only involved in a small part of this pathway, but I find it exciting and think it is very worthwhile.